“I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be left alone.’ There is all the difference in the world.”

Greta Garbo was born Greta Gustafsson in Sweden in 1905. When Greta was 14, her father died, leaving the family destitute and Greta was forced to leave school and take work in a department store. The store used her modeling abilities to advertise their products and it was there that Greta developed the aspiration to act after appearing in an advertising short for the department store while still a teenager.

This led to a role in a short comedy film, “Peter the Tramp” in 1920 and encouraged by her film success, Greta applied for and won a scholarship to a Swedish film school. During her studies, Garbo played several small roles in films but it was her role in the film “The Atonement of Gosta Berling” (1923), directed by the famed Swedish director, Maurice Stiller, which was to launch her career. At the age of 18, Greta was on a roll and at the age of 20, both Garbo and Stiller were offered contracts with MGM. Garbo’s first film in the US was a silent film, “The Torrent” in 1925. After several more silent films, Garbo starred in her first American talking film, “Anna Christie” in 1930 for which she was nominated for Academy Award Best Actress. In 1931, Garbo appeared opposite Clark Gable in “Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall” and in 1931 in the film “Mata Hari”. Greta continued to make successful films but it was MGM’s “Anna Karenina” (1935) where she gave the performance of her life.

In 1941, Greta Garbo made the comedy, “Two-Faced Woman” which was to be her last film as after World War Two, feeling that the world had changed, Garbo retired from films and would never again appear in front of the camera. For the rest of her life, Garbo worked hard to maintain the mystique surrounding her and left Hollywood for New York. Greta Garbo was awarded an Oscar in 1954 for previous outstanding performances. Garbo died in New York in 1990 at the age of 84 of natural causes which put an end to the “Garbo Mystique” which she had worked so hard to cultivate.

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